Re: Thinkpad 560,need Hints/Experiences

[star@starshine.org (Heather Stern)]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 12:37:35PM +0100, Andreas wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> i'm planning to reactivate an old
> IBM Thinkpad 560 with P5/100 16 MB Ram,
> 
> and would like to hear your suggestions
> regarding (is running X possible ?) or
> are there any Links you can give to me ?

Yes, running X is possible, but I recommend a reasonable size swap file
and going for a lightweight windowmanager rather than any desktop
environment.  FVWM is about the heaviest I'd try, and that only if you
want your menus to have icons in it.   Or one of the gtk-based wm's
would probably do.   Many people are happy enough with ratpoison or
blackbox.

You probably want to make it so GUI mode does not run except on request. 

RAM saving maneuvers can include reducing the number of getty processes 
listed in /etc/inittab, disabling daemons you don't need, running
the ones you might need under any of the inetd variants (because then
it will only launch when used), and using lightweight programs that 
perform similar functions (e.g. thttpd is much smaller than apache, 
and there are even tinier web daemons if you don't need a full featured
one).

Keep an eye open for svgalib apps and ncurses apps able to do what you
need - these are much lighter than X plus the GUI edition.  

Unfortunately decent GUI-but-not-X browsers aren't too thick on the
ground;  in fact if you know of one that's any good please chime in.
There are a bunch of text mode browsers and with zgv and a good set 
of lines in /etc/mailcap lynx can quite happily view graphics... when 
you select them.  Whichever one you pick if you like these, get the 
-ssl edition of their package, unless you've got a good reason to 
avoid crypto.

> (linux-on-laptops has only 1 Comment
> running Debian on Thinkapd)

I've got a 560E that runs it fine (which I gave to a friend) but it has
more RAM than that.  Nonetheless, if mulinux can do it, I'm sure we can
too :) 

> thank you for suggestions and URLs
> Andreas

* Heather Stern * star@ many places...
                * Starshine Technical Services -*- 800 938 4078